Principal Engineer (Platform)

TL;DR

Principal Engineer (Platform): Taking ownership of Technical Excellence, Security and Privacy, and Platform Operations for global gaming products with an accent on driving architectural decisions, site reliability engineering, and developer productivity. Focus on establishing performance budgets, leading incident response, and building robust observability across all systems.

Location: Remote within British Columbia, Canada. Must be legally eligible to work in Canada. In-person attendance is required 2-6 times a year.

Salary: $140,000 - $200,000 CAD

Company

hirify.global is an independent, remote-first gaming studio building communities through engaging gaming experiences, with over 35 million downloads and close to $100M in sales.

What you will do

• Drive studio-wide programs for quality, performance, and continuous improvement across all products.
• Lead Security and Privacy initiatives, ensuring compliance with platform security requirements.
• Manage the Operations team, setting Service Level Objectives and designing resilient systems.
• Build comprehensive observability systems with standardized logs, metrics, traces, and real-time error reporting.
• Improve developer productivity and the Software Development Lifecycle through CI/CD, quality gates, and security scanning.
• Own cloud budgets and forecasts, driving FinOps initiatives to optimize costs versus performance.
• Act as incident commander for high-severity issues and proactively manage technical risks.
• Mentor Tech Leads and senior Individual Contributors, fostering a culture of clear ownership and delivery.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Legal, Finance, and Player Success teams.
• Leverage AI as a force multiplier to accelerate development and operations.
• Own the Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SRED) process with auditable eligibility gates.

Requirements

• 10+ years in software engineering with 3+ years as a principal-level platform/architecture leader.
• Proven experience operating high-availability, high-throughput consumer systems.
• Strong AWS background (IAM, VPC, EC2/ECS/Fargate, S3, KMS, GuardDuty, Security Hub, CloudTrail, Config).
• Proficiency in Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or CDK) and CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions or equivalent).
• Experience with Security and privacy ownership in platform-reviewed environments.
• Expertise in SRE and performance engineering (SLOs, incident management, load/performance testing, graceful degradation).
• Experience with data architecture across relational and non-relational systems.
• Proficiency with observability stacks (Graylog, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana or Datadog, ELK/OpenSearch; Sentry/Crashlytics, Backtrace or equivalent).
• Production experience applying AI to speed development and operations.
• Clear communication skills to influence across product, engineering, legal, and finance teams.
• Must reside in British Columbia, Canada, and be legally eligible to work in Canada.

Nice to have

• Unity, HTML5/JavaScript, and/or PHP game platform experience.
• Prior responsibility for FinOps and vendor negotiations.
• Experience running SRED or similar R&D incentive programs.
• Experience with Mongo and/or MySQL.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive wages determined by market research.
• Uncapped profit share program.
• Health, dental, and vision benefits.
• 3 weeks vacation to start, paid holiday shutdown in December, and 12 paid Care Days per year.
• Yearly Continuous Improvement allowance.
• A results-driven company with a compassionate culture.
• Opportunity to work on game projects enjoyed by millions of players worldwide.
• Ability to make a direct impact by discussing ideas with leadership.